Language Standardization and Language Change: The Dynamics of Cape Dutch (review)

The development of Afrikaans is a compelling topic, for a number of reasons. As Deumert points out, Afrikaans is ‘the only language with a pidgin/creole ancestry which has been fully standardized’ (1); it is also the only such language to replace its lexifier (Dutch) in all areas. Its standardization proceeded extremely rapidly: the first grammar of Afrikaans was published in 1876, it was made a fully official language in South Africa in 1925, and it had been fully codified and standardized by the 1930s. This book ‘provides a detailed sociolinguistic description of central aspects of the early standardization history of Afrikaans and the dynamics of the Cape Dutch variation continuum’ (9), drawing on insights from language standardization, language planning, norm theory, and historical sociolinguistics, among other fields.

The book is divided into three sections. The first section, ‘History’, begins with an introduction (1–11), which describes the study of language standardization and outlines the contents of the book. Ch. 1, ‘Afrikaans sociohistorical linguistics: Reconstructing language formation’ (15–44), gives a bird’s-eye view of the history of Afrikaans in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, concentrating on language contact within South African society. Ch. 2, ‘Afrikaner nationalism and the discovery of the vernacular’ (45–76), looks at issues like the growth of dialect writing, the role of Afrikaner nationalism in the early stages of standardization, and language attitudes. Ch. 3, ‘The Corpus of Cape Dutch correspondence and the social context of language use in the nineteenth century’ (77–102), describes the corpus D relied on in the preparation of this book and discusses the social contexts of language use at the turn of the twentieth century.

The second section, ‘Variation analysis’, begins with a chapter called ‘On the analysis of variability and uniformity: An introduction to multivariate clustering techniques’ (105–33), which introduces various concepts used in the analysis of the Corpus of Cape Dutch correspondence, for example, multidimensional scaling. These concepts are illustrated using data from William Labov’s work on copula deletion in African American Vernacular English (AAVE). The next two chapters, ‘The gradualness of morphosyntactic change’ (135–78) and ‘Morpholexical and syntactic variation’ (179–219), explore variation in the Cape Dutch corpus. Evidence from both the Afrikaans superstrate (Dutch) and substrate (Creole Portuguese, Malay, Khoe) is considered. The section concludes with a chapter on ‘The Cape Dutch variety spectrum: Clusters, continua and patterns of language alternation’ (221–58), which provides a multivariate analysis of the data.

The third section, ‘Establishing the norm’, contains two chapters: ‘Engels, Engels, alles Engels: Language contact, conflict, and purism’ (261–77), and ‘Social networks and the diffusion of standard Afrikaans’ (279–96). The first deals with the place of English in the Cape Dutch variety, as well as its influence. The second presents a social network model of the spread of Afrikaans. The study proper concludes with a brief ‘Epilogue: Language standardization and language change’ (297–304), which reviews various hypotheses about the development of Afrikaans. There is also an appendix listing the contents of the Corpus of Cape Dutch correspondence, a list of references, and an index.

D has tackled a very difficult subject and done a very good job with it. The book is well written and the analysis is careful and persuasive. This book is well worth the time and effort necessary to read it.